‘Scary & absurd Chicken from Hell’ roamed US millions of years ago

Scientists have unveiled an unknown species of predatory, bird-like dinosaur with sharp claws, a beak and over 3 meters tall. The freakish animal, which roamed the US 66 million years ago, has been aptly dubbed the ‘Chicken from Hell.’

Researchers at the Carnegie and Smithsonian museums, together
with colleagues from the University of Utah, are excited and
perplexed at the scary contemporary of T-Rex and native of the
Dakotas, with its runners’ legs, sporty body – and probably a
very unfriendly demeanor. Despite this, the ‘perdition-poultry’
was an omnivore and fed on a varied diet of smaller animals,
vegetation, plants and other animals’ eggs. It was actually a
very precisely engineered and evolutionarily-adapted animal,
researchers explained in a press release on the University of Utah
website.

Neither chicken, nor even bird, “it was a giant raptor, but
with a chicken-like head and presumably feathers,” said the
co-author Emma Schachner of the animal. It “stood about 10
feet tall” and “would be scary as well as absurd to
encounter,” added Matt Lamanna of the Carnegies Museum of
Natural History in Pittsburgh, who was lead author on the study,
which reached long-awaited publication in PLOS ONE, a journal of the
Public Library of Science.

“We jokingly call this the ‘chicken from hell,’ and I think
that’s pretty appropriate.” Most resembling a gigantic
flightless bird, akin to an ostrich or an emu, the animal is
actually an oviraptosaur, a feather-clad predator whose fossils
can most commonly be found in Asia, although the current
reconstruction was made from a North-American find.

"It would have had a lot of birdy behaviors," Lamanna
added.

The fowl beast’s real name is Anzu wylie: the first word derived
from a bird-like demon from Mesopotamian mythology, while the
other from the name of a grandson of one of the Carnegie Museum’s
trustees. The Pittsburgh museum has the fully reconstructed
skeleton currently on display.

The excavation yielded three partial skeletons of the
oviraptosaur, dug up at one of the uppermost sedimentary rock
levels of the Hell Creek rock complex that spans North and South
Dakota in the US. The place is literally a goldmine of dinosaur
fossil finds, with T-Rex and Triceratops popping up very
frequently.

It’s the biggest oviraptosaur in the species, researchers say.

"This group of dinosaurs looks really bizarre even by
dinosaurian standards," continued Hans-Dieter Sues, a
paleontologist and co-author, also from the Smithsonian.

Another noteworthy aspect of the discovery is that there aren’t
very many finds from the end of the Cretaceous period. This lends
suspicion to the hypothesis that at the time the supposedly
apocalyptic meteor hit Earth and triggered a mass extinction of
the beautiful and scary animals, the dinosaurs were actually
already on their way out.

Researchers would also argue, however, that dinosaurs haven’t
really gone away. Recent finds suggest that a large number of
them had feathers, which goes against almost everything the ’80s
generation read in books.

The flightless, bird-like dinosaur species mark the end of an
era, but there’s a strong belief among scientists that the birds
we see today are living proof that the graceful animals have not
gone away, but are merely another link in the chain of
evolutionary pressures.